


Tabitha and Thomas

by JohnBurtonLee



Series: Scrapheap [2]
Category: Dreaming of Sunshine - Silver Queen, The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 07:40:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27180040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JohnBurtonLee/pseuds/JohnBurtonLee
Summary: Some scenes from the year in betweenHow I Ended Up Teaching a Part Time Eldritch Abominationand Dead Beat centered around the relationship between Tabitha andExperimental Subject Number OneThomas.
Relationships: Nara Shikako & Thomas Raith
Series: Scrapheap [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1983239
Comments: 17
Kudos: 262
Collections: Heliocentrism — a Dreaming of Sunshine recursive collection





	Tabitha and Thomas

**Author's Note:**

> My usual beta/collaborator is getting out of fanfiction, and ~~as a result of emotional blackmail~~ as a thank you for her hard work, I'll be publishing some unfinished things ~~that she hopes that someone else will successfully nag me into completing~~.
> 
> Unlike other works she's nominated, this one is under active development. It's still going in the scrapheap series because there's no guarantees that anything in here will stay the same once I get around to doing the full Dead Beat treatment. That's probably not going to be until 2021, though.

Harry had put it off as long as he could, but now that he had students, it was more or less inevitable that they would meet Thomas. He wasn't really worried about Molly; he just needed to have a bucket of cold water handy until Molly got used to the aura. Tabitha… well, Tabitha was strong enough that she could conceivably hold Thomas down and ravish him, and Harry wasn't too sure that Thomas would be able to defend himself non-lethally if Tabitha went all shadow tentacle monster when doing it. 

For that matter, he wasn't sure that lethal countermeasures would be sufficient, but that might just be his fear of Karrin at work. 

So Harry came up with an elaborate plan for how they should meet for the first time: open field during noon, Michael escorting her, and so on. Because Tabitha was smarter than him and knew her own capabilities better, he ran the plan by her. 

"Are you sure you don't want to put me in a straightjacket first?" Judging by the eye roll, Tabitha wasn't serious about that suggestion. 

"It probably wouldn't hurt. I'll have to ask Murph if she knows where I can get one." Of course, Harry might not survive mentioning that it had to fit Tabitha, but it's not like he was planning on living forever. 

Tabitha sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Does Thomas's aura affect you?" 

"Well, no, but I'm not into guys." 

"Neither am I." 

"Oh. Well there goes hours of planning." 

Tabitha gave him what seemed like a genuinely confused look. "When has planning ever worked out for you?" 

Harry's shoulders fell. "You've been talking to Murphy again, haven't you?" 

"Really anyone who's ever known you." 

"I've had plans work! Once or twice." 

Tabitha gave him a very condescending pat on the arm. "Keep telling yourself that, Obi-wan." 

"So… the not being into guys thing… is that something I shouldn't mention around your family?" 

"I've mentioned it to my dad." Tabby frowned. "Though I'm not sure I was clear that I meant 'at all' rather than 'yet.'" She waved her hand in dismissal. "They wouldn't care anyway. I think dad would be relieved, not that he should be." 

"That doesn't sound like it makes sense." And Tabitha always made sense if you looked at things the most horrible way possible. 

"Eh. I'm responsible enough that I wouldn't forget protection but every minute I'm not chasing after guys is a minute I can spend on projects like an unlicensed nuclear accelerator in the basement." 

"You're building an unlicensed nuclear accelerator in your basement?" 

"No, don't be silly." Harry braced himself because he knew her a lot better by now. "I'm building an unlicensed nuclear accelerator in _your_ basement. Bob's helping." 

Harry sighed. "I'd like to think I'd notice something like that." He didn't think he left her unsupervised that often. 

Tabby repeated the condescending pat. "I know you would, sensei. Cyclotrons can be quite small." 

"Aren't you supposed to be a math major?" 

"And what's physics except applied mathematics? Now that I have magic, I fully intend to math the universe into submission." Tabby then broke out into a creepy laugh that should have sounded comical from a fourteen year old girl, but really, really wasn't. 

Harry pushed his palm between his eyes. It didn't really help with the headache. "No nuclear accelerators in my basement." 

"You're going to break Bob's heart. He gets bored, you know." 

Later Harry would look back on this incident and realize that this was Tabby easing him into her insanity. 

* * *

Harry would have liked to have said that Tabitha meeting Thomas was completely event free because she was, as advertised, not at all attracted to him. Unfortunately, he had forgotten that all thoughts of sex were replaced by thoughts of Science! It definitely deserved the capital and the exclamation point. It probably deserved replacing the exclamation point with a lightning bolt. 

"I know I'm used to pretty girls treating me as nothing but a slab of meat, but this is still a new one on me. Are you sure she isn't going to dissect me?" 

Tabby was scribbling in a hand notebook, occasionally glancing at Thomas and walking back and forth. 

"Um, Tabby?" 

"Definitely follows an inverse square relation," she muttered before looking up. "Yes, sensei?" 

"What are you doing?" 

"Did you realize that his sexy aura is the most straightforward magical aura I've encountered? I'm pretty sure I can model it as a point source spherical wave. Though, there's an interesting harmonic in the pressure front…." Her voice trailed off and her eyes unfocused as she tapped the notebook with the end of her mechanical pencil. 

Harry rubbed his temples with one hand and tried not to think about what she implied about encountering other magical auras. "The answer is no, I'm not sure she isn't going to dissect you." 

"Don't be ridiculous. How am I going to do any experiments if he's dead? No promises about vivisection." 

"Uhh… she's giving my sisters serious competition in the scary female category." Presumably he wasn't including Inari, but you never know. 

"I'm only a part time eldritch abomination," Tabitha said as she shifted the arm holding the pencil into a spiky tentacle. 

"It says something about my upbringing that this display makes me feel less scared instead of more." 

"Too much tentacle hentai?" snarked Harry. 

"What's tentacle hentai?" asked Tabitha in a distracted manner as she went back to taking notes. It should be pointed out that she did this with her arm still transformed into the tentacle. 

"Something you should pretend I didn't say, especially when around your mom." 

"Blackmail material, gotcha." 

"And we're back to her reminding me of a blonde version of Lara. It's creepy seeing someone else instinctively identifying blackmail opportunities while paying attention to something else." 

"I was a ninja in a past life," she muttered. 

"Though I think she gets spewing complete and utter bullshit from you." 

Harry sighed. "No, she came this way." 

"So, Experimental Subject Number One, do you know how noise cancelling headphones work?" 

"I'd just like to point out that I'm rather uncomfortable with that nickname." Harry probably shouldn't have enjoyed the faint whine in that protest, but Thomas had made an absolute mess of his living room. Though Harry was irritated by the fact that Thomas managed to make a whine sound manly. 

Tabitha ignored his comment and said, "Active noise canceling headphones work by sampling low frequency continuous noise and generating a phase shifted output to create destructive interference. Even though your aura has weird harmonics it qualifies as a low frequency wave." 

"Whoa. Whoa. Whoa." Harry waved his hands back and forth. "You can cancel out his aura? You realize the White Court would kill to keep that kind of knowledge quiet." 

Tabitha made a waffling motion with the hand holding her notebook, her other hand still occupied with being a thing out of nightmares. "Not really. Between the weird harmonics and real world considerations like actually moving around, sampling at a distance from the emission point wouldn't be very effective. What I think I can do is create a harness that combined with a sensor that could create islands of destructive interference. So, let's say if there's one person within ten feet of you, it would prevent them from feeling the full brunt of your sexy vibes." She took on an exaggerated thinking pose. "Actually, since they're caused by harmonics on a carrier wave, sexy vibes might be a literal description here." 

Harry felt a headache build. "Okay, that sounds suitably scientific, but did it occur to you that we're talking about magic here and not science?" 

"Meh. It works or it doesn't. Either way, knowledge is advanced. That's what Science is!" Tabitha's eyes seemed to glow slightly at that declaration. Harry wondered if he was imagining it or not, because he was pretty certain that she could make her eyes glow if she wanted to, especially if she thought it might bother him. 

"You really think this might work?" asked Thomas hopefully. 

"I'm pretty good at destroying things, and since Mr. Stick-In-The-Mud doesn't want us continuing work on the nuclear accelerator in the basement, we can cannibalize parts from that. All it'll cost is time." 

"The what in the basement?" 

* * *

Ever since Harry had started tutoring Molly and Tabitha, he had been having a lot more beers with Michael. This was partly because Michael damn well owed him the alcohol, but more so that he had someone to vent to that could understand. 

Though complaining about Molly's crush on him was largely an exercise in futility, because Michael was infuriatingly convinced in Harry's innate goodness and knew nothing would happen because Harry wouldn't let it happen. He was right that Harry wasn't a pedophile, but not a pedophile and being a good man were actually pretty far apart as you measure morality. Michael could have at least pretended to be worried. The man was just amused and didn't have any of the appropriate overprotective father instincts to lock her in her room until she was forty. 

At least he was appropriately worried about Tabitha's antics. 

"...and whatever the heck a carrier waveform is, disrupting it cancels out the effect of his aura almost completely. Of course to do that, she needed to shove needles under his skin, and Thomas was actually happy to let her do it!" This was mark four of their attempts to get his aura under control, and they made progress with every revision, both in effectiveness and disturbingness. 

Michael grimaced. "That's a disquieting image." 

Harry threw his hands in the air, "And don't get me started on how the White Court would react if they knew that she could neutralize one of them with a little acupuncture and a nine volt!" Okay, it wasn't nearly that simple. Tabitha wasn't capable of enchanting or using spells the same way a wizard was, so what she did was the magical equivalent of making a mechanical computer out of paper clips and old car parts. It was very impressive in a "are you sure it's not going to eat anyone in the gears?" kind of way. 

Though knowing Tabby, she would regard that as a feature, not a bug. 

Michael wiped his face with one hand. "I'll talk to her about being discreet, but I can't exactly fault her for trying to help a good man try to live a normal life despite his unfortunate heritage." 

"She wants to study his feeding process next." 

Michael paled. "First hand?" 

"Thomas is a Raith. They feed on lust," Harry reminded him. Michael relaxed at the reminder that Tabby wasn't into guys. Harry decided not to think about the possibility that she might be into girls and try kidnapping Lara for experiments. Nope, as far as Harry concerned, Tabby was asexual and completely immune to House Raith. 

Actually, Harry wasn't sure that Tabby was capable of feeling fear or despair either, which would sweep all the branches of the White Court. Her reaction to things most people would find scary is dissection/vivisection and hopelessness isn't something that happens to people who literally dissect their problems. 

"Sometimes I worry that with Tabitha, we've gone horribly right with her upbringing. I taught her how to defend herself and then had to send her to someone else because I did too good of a job of it. We taught her to do the right thing no matter who it might anger, and now it might anger half the vampires in the world." It's not like there was a vampire census, but Harry was pretty sure that was an exaggeration as the Reds outnumbered the Whites. 

"I think the Science bit is all her, though." 

"Yes, well…." Michael sounded uncomfortable at that, which was odd. One of the things that Harry liked about Michael was that he was all the best bits of the church and faith, and he wasn't against science. Or gays. Or really anything except hate. He was a for kind of person. You know, like being for loving your neighbor. Michael was basically Mr. Rogers with a sword. Actually, he wasn't sure Mr. Rogers drank, but Mr. Rogers didn't have Tabby as a daughter. 

"Michael?" 

The big guy sighed. "Tabby…. I think Tabby hates God." 

Harry didn't think he heard that right. "With you as a father? I know she does church charity stuff, and I think I've heard her say nice things about Father Forthill." 

"Tabby loves me. She loves most of the people in our Church, which assuredly includes the Padre. She accepts that in our world, faith in God has a real power that protects." 

"But?" 

"As long as she's known that I was a Knight, which for her was at a frightfully young age, she's known that there is no retirement plan." 

Michael wasn't an arrogant kind of guy. See the previous comment about being the best part of the faith. He would probably be willing to let the next guy have Amoracchius if he showed up, and because of that divine providence thing that was the hallmark of how the Knights operated, the next guy would find his way to the sword as soon as someone qualified existed. The problem was that out of the six and half billion people on the planet there were only two qualified guys alive. It had already been a year since Shiro had passed, and it might be years more before someone took his place. So, yeah, Michael would keep going until he couldn't anymore, because it wasn't him or the next guy. It was him or nothing. 

"How old was this?" 

Michael hummed to himself. "Around four or five." 

Well that explained the happily murderous thoughts towards anyone who threatened her family in pre-teen Tabby's soul. "And she blames God for your lack of retirement options?" 

"Or the fact that the job is necessary in the first place." 

"I guess you explained the free will thing to her?" 

Michael grimaced. "I'm rather glad I didn't understand most of her counter arguments. I had to do a lot of praying for the ones I did." 

"That bad?" 

"It's one thing if Tabby was only citing statistics or science. It's another when she can point to specific people who come by the soup kitchen." 

"Huh?" 

"A lot of homeless people are homeless because of mental issues, and most of those are due to… chemical imbalances. With the right medications they could find and keep jobs. How much free will is involved if they were born into families unable to afford such medications?" 

"Ouch." It definitely explained why the Carpenters spent so much time doing charity work for the homeless. The Fist of God wasn't limited to fighting supernatural evils. "Well, I'm glad she didn't start causing headaches just for me." 

"There's a reason Charity doesn't mind our beer expenses." 

Harry settled back in his seat. "Why didn't you warn me about her craziness?" 

"Harry," Michael said in a measured, even tone. "You soul-gazed her." 

"That is an annoyingly reasonable answer." 

* * *

Of all the mistakes Harry had made in his life, the one he regretted the most was introducing Thomas and Tabitha. Doing research that the White Court might murder them all for aside, they were _bonding_. Thankfully it wasn't romantic in either direction. Tabby wasn't into guys and Thomas thought of Tabby like another sister. Of course, considering his sisters, that wasn't exactly a comforting description. Inari at least wasn't a monster, but Harry had met her on the set of a porn studio. 

The thing was, Tabby was brought up by a couple who thought that attacking each other with medieval weaponry was a fun afternoon and Thomas was a vampire. Neither of them had exactly well adjusted ideas of what proper bonding activities were. This led to Tabby chasing Thomas with a bearded axe in an abandoned quarry south of Chicago. Technically they were sparring and Thomas had a sword to defend himself, but he had made the mistake of telling Tabby not to hold back and that he could take anything she could dish out. 

Now Harry wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but even he knew that wasn't something you tell someone trained by Murphy, though he was pretty sure the results would have been pretty much the same before Murph got her hands on Tabby. There was a reason the two of them got along so well. 

"Yes! Run! It will make your defeat taste all the sweeter!" 

Thomas didn't have the breath to respond beyond a "Shit", though he was probably thinking that Tabby was reminding him a little too much of one of his sisters. That's rather literal. One of his sisters' favorite weapons was an axe. 

"Bwa ha ha ha ha!" 

Yes, Tabby was fourteen. Yes, she was female. Yes, she was human. 

"I love the taste of fear in the morning!" 

That didn't change the fact that the strength of her hits were limited by how tough the _axe_ was. Harry suspected that Thomas knew that he was going to be outclassed and decided to rip the bandage off and find out just how outclassed he actually was. 

"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" 

He chose a really stupid way to do it, though. Probably ran in the family. 

"Dance, my pretty! Dance!" 

Harry had to admit that he expected that Thomas could at least make Tabby breathe harder than normal. If she was, it was only because of all the bloodthirsty battle cries. 

"Are you trying to kill me, you violent maniac?" 

"Of course not! If I wanted you dead you would be dead and I would have an alibi." 

"Are you sure you're not one of my cousins?" 

Okay, so maybe them bonding wasn't completely horrible. It had its amusing moments. Harry's only real complaint was that Thomas still looked good getting the crap beat out of him. Real bruises were ugly things. Thomas got movie star bruises that just made him look more ruggedly handsome. 

* * *

"Stilts." 

Harry froze at the sound of Murphy's voice on the phone. An angry Murphy didn't scare him (much) anymore because that was her default state when he was around her. An amused sounding Murphy was an omen of pain. Often literally after he made the mistake of letting her teach him stick fighting. 

"Yeah?" 

"When were you going to tell me you were gay?" 

Harry resisted the urge to slam his head on his desk. "For fuck's sake. What did Tabby do this time?" 

"Good instincts." 

Harry tried to rub his headache away. It didn't work this time any more than it did any of the other times he tried since he started teaching the Carpenter girls. "I may be a special kind of idiot, Murph, but even I'm not stupid enough to miss some patterns. Tabby's favorite hobby is fucking with people, prefreably with the truth." 

"Well, oddly when a nubile fourteen year old girl and a male sex on legs are seen together-" 

"Tabby turned fifteen last month." 

Murphy ignored him and continued, "-by a cop who may have had his ass handed to him by said fifteen year old girl the week before, that cop might stop and investigate and make sure nothing inappropriate is going on." 

Harry could very well picture the scene. "And Tabby said a bunch of things that were all technically true that painted the image of me and Thomas being lovers without outright saying it and Thomas played along with lots of innuendo that Tabby pretended went right over her head." 

"Something about there being only one bed in your apartment and the couch not looking like something someone could sleep on and still walk the next day." 

"I don't know if I want to ask those trolls for more details or pretend this conversation never happened. Please tell me it's not someone I know." 

"It was one of Malone's nephews. I'm not sure which one." 

"He has multiple nephews in the force?" 

"Two. But you know how us cops gossip. It wouldn't matter who Tabby talked to." That was definitely Murphy's taunting voice. "It doesn't help that she's a minor celebrity around here." Right, because Tabby can face Murphy going all out and not die. 

Harry groaned. "Please tell me you didn't call just to taunt me." 

"I'm also going on vacation. Tabby's watering my plants, so don't keep her too busy." 

"You trust Tabby with the keys to your home?" 

"As if I need to," Karrin scoffed. "She can pick the locks on my door faster than I can unlock them using a key. She told me that she most definitely didn't learn that from you." 

"Well… good. Because she didn't." 

"I know, though with some of the trouble you've gotten into, maybe she should teach you." 

"Thanks for the vote of confidence. Got anything that doesn't relate to bruising my ego?" 

Harry didn't need to hear that she was going on vacation with Kincaid. Well at least now Tabitha's comments about Murphy's terrible taste in men made a lot more sense. 


End file.
